The development of apparatus for optical recording and recovering of information from rotatable discs has created opportunity for making improvements in a variety of applications one of which is the storage of large volumes of records which are only infrequently recalled for examination, if ever. Death certificates, legislative proceedings, fingerprints, repair records, any of a very wide variety of public and private records which need to be archived are examples. The laser or optical disc can store images of pictures and signatures and has the potential for obsoleting the practice of warehousing paper copies in the hope that a particular copy can be recovered at some future time if needed. Together the optical disc and computers can identify both a record and its storage position and create indexes to permit rapid recover/of that information. Optical disc and computer technology provides the means for accomplishing the storage and recovery tasks but it requires special apparatus and some skill to use and maintain it. When the volume of records is small, filing copies in a cardboard box, may be more practical. However, facsimile technology has added the ability to transfer text and pictures and signatures electronically. It is possible to provide a central optical storage and recovery facility to which many public and private organizations can communicate electronically. Large central record storage and recovery facilities could afford skilled librarians and coding experts capable of storing documents so that they are readily identified and recoverable years after the source organization and it's people are no longer available to provide identifying clues. Some of the records that ought to be kept but which are not kept because of the cost of storage and recovery, could be saved if the optical disc and computer system could be made to accomplish storage and recovery of individual records at minimal cost. The cost of performing the tasks depends primarily upon cost of acquisition and maintenance of equipment, physical space requirements and record input and recovery time. The ratio of it's physical size to volume of storage capability is very high so the optical disc has the potential for solving the space problem if the disc handling apparatus permits close spacing of discs. The amount and cost of computer and disc writing and reading capability depends in large measure on record entry and recovery time. It is to entry and recovery time and space reduction that this invention is addressed.
In a facility for storing records which :may seldom if ever be recovered, much more writing capacity than recover capacity is required. Writing would be accomplished in parallel which means that several write units would operate at the same time recording on separate discs. Separation of records by originating organization or by subject matter would dictate setting a disc aside after writing a record and then recovering that disc at a later time for the addition of another record. Because of those system characteristics a large, central, optical storage and recovery facility can be expected to accumulate very large numbers of discs each disc of which must be stored to be readily available for reading and writing. A major element of any such optical disc storage facility, whether large or medium or small, would be the structure in which the discs were stored including the storage spaces for individual discs and the means for moving the individual discs between those spaces and write and read positions. A major contribution is made to the practicality and operating economics of optical record storage if the disc storage facility and the disc handling system can be made simple, inexpensive and reliable and if disc access time is minimized.